Bronx Neighbors Protest Planned Residences for Homeless

Mary V. Lauro, president of the Wakefield Taxpayers and Civic League, opposes plans for more residences for the homeless. “Some people don’t want to have the trappings of civilization,” she said.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

Even with the rumble of elevated trains overhead, Doreen Smith, a Jamaican immigrant, has worked hard for 17 years to maintain the cachet of her Beautopia hair salon in the modest neighborhood of Wakefield, about as far north as you can go in the Bronx without stepping into Westchester.

Whatever the neighborhood’s ragged edges, she proudly boasts that she retained a loyal clientele and persuaded upscale companies like Aveda to place their hair care and skin care products in her shop. But now she is worried.

Plans for three residences for homeless people have been unveiled in the past year or two, all within a few blocks of her salon, with one for H.I.V. and AIDS patients virtually next door.

“I think it’s going to be a deterrent,” she said. “People will be hanging out — what else do they have to do? — and my customers are not going to want to park their cars in front of the store and sit comfortably and do their hair.”

Ms. Smith has joined more than 2,000 neighbors in signing petitions to oppose what they and neighborhood legislators call the “oversaturation of Wakefield” with homeless shelters and other social service centers.

The neighborhood of 68,000 people, whose brick and clapboard two-family homes are owned by Caribbean immigrants, African-Americans and a shrinking Italian-American population, has been hard hit by foreclosures and is struggling to keep up its working- and middle-class allure. Many residents say that more shelters would set the neighborhood back.

The plan that is furthest along, on which construction may begin next year, would put a seven-story residence for 63 H.I.V./AIDS patients or drug addicts along with supportive services on a now-weedy lot below the elevated tracks where the No. 2 and No. 5 trains run.

Two other proposals, both in early planning and approval stages, would involve more temporary shelters — one for 200 homeless veterans, and another across the street for 100 single adults. A fourth residence is planned less than a mile away — a shelter for abused women.

This dispute comes against a background of a teeming homeless population in New York City as a result of persistent joblessness and the cascade of home foreclosures. On Oct. 4, the city’s Department of Homeless Services recorded 35,609 individuals staying in roughly 250 shelters around the five boroughs, among them 8,049 families with children. City officials are under legal mandates to provide housing, and officials say they have tried to apportion it fairly. Four residences, they contend, are not too many for a single neighborhood when some neighborhoods have 13 social service centers.

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Doreen Smith, who runs Beautopia Salon, worries that nearby residences for the homeless might drive away her customers.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

The city has a pesky, strong-willed opponent in Mary V. Lauro, president for the past 20 years of the 97-year-old Wakefield Taxpayers and Civic League. A retired adhesives chemist, she looks back on her organization’s successful battles with a hot-sheet motel and an Off-Track Betting parlor. She worries about property values, and she contends that too many of the homeless have problems that would hurt her enclave’s sedate tenor.

The Web site of the nonprofit agency that is building the seven-story residence, Praxis Housing Initiatives, said that about 25 percent of its clientele have criminal histories, 75 percent have drug or alcohol problems and 75 percent mental health issues.

“Some people don’t want to have the trappings of civilization,” Ms. Lauro said. “We can’t have them in the street, but there is a reason they’re chronically homeless. We’re not talking about people suddenly thrown out.”

Svein Jorgensen, chief executive of Praxis, which runs four government-subsidized transitional residences in Manhattan and Brooklyn, said many residents would have jobs, and a 24-hour on-site staff would keep order. (The cost of housing a client, he said, is $18,000 to $22,000 per year, most of it publicly financed but some paid by residents, with rents scaled by income.)

The shelter for homeless veterans would, if approved, be in what is now the Sgt. Joseph A. Muller Army Reserve Center, which must close by next year. By federal mandate, forsaken military properties must first be offered for helping the homeless, city officials said.

One group vying for the site is the Doe Fund, a 25-year-old nonprofit agency that helps the homeless find work and housing. The shelter across the street would be for single adults and operated by Project Renewal, which runs a half-dozen homeless residences, including Holland House near Times Square. Spokesmen for the Doe Fund and Project Renewal referred questions to the Department of Homeless Services.

A spokeswoman for the department, Barbara Brancaccio, said in a statement that her agency, in providing emergency shelter to the homeless, “strives to keep individuals and families in or close to communities whether they have existing supports system whenever possible.”

Dominick Stephen, 23, a Jamaican immigrant who is a salesman in a real estate agency next door to the site of the proposed Praxis residence, worries that “there will be a lot of different characters” with “bad tendencies” introduced into the commercial strip under the elevated tracks at White Plains Road.

“Three in one area — why would they do that?” he asked.

His agency, Nardin Realty Associates, specializes in finding apartments for people who qualify for Section 8 federal rent assistance, some of whom have been homeless. As he spoke, Darlene Fermin, 24, was in his office with her mother and two daughters, ages 5 and 6, applying for an apartment. She overheard Mr. Stephen and piped up that she, too, was homeless and had been living in a Bronx shelter since January. Most shelter residents, she told him, are decent people who have had some hard knocks.

“If you move into anyplace, you’re going to find people you don’t want to live with,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on October 16, 2010, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Bronx Neighbors Protest Planned Residences for Homeless. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe